By Jared Evan 

(JEWISH VOICE NEWS) New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s honeymoon barely lasted a week before one of his most controversial appointments detonated into a full-blown political mess. Cea Weaver — the radical-left housing activist Mamdani tapped to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants — is now under intense scrutiny after a trove of resurfaced statements attacking homeownership, private property, and capitalism itself went viral, as Fox Digital reported.

Weaver, a longtime Democratic Socialists of America activist, previously argued that private property — “especially homeownership” — is a “weapon of white supremacy masquerading as wealth-building public policy,” according to a 2019 post uncovered by critics and highlighted by Fox Digital. In another earlier post, Weaver openly called to “elect more communists,” a statement that has since reignited concerns about the ideological direction of Mamdani’s administration.

In a 2021 DSA video that has resurfaced and circulated widely online, Weaver dismissed centuries of American property law, saying society has wrongly treated property as an “individualized good” rather than a “collective good,” Fox Digital reported. She went further, arguing that families — “white families especially” — would need to accept a fundamentally different relationship to property ownership under her vision of “shared equity.”

The comments set off alarm bells well beyond City Hall. U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told Fox Digital that the Department of Justice is “on high alert” over the “radical agenda promised by Mayor Mamdani,” warning that many of the ideas being floated are incompatible with constitutional and civil rights protections. Dhillon added that the DOJ “will not hesitate to take legal action” if New Yorkers’ rights are threatened.

Despite the backlash, Mamdani enthusiastically defended Weaver at the time of her appointment, calling her a “proven, principled and tireless fighter” capable of holding landlords accountable. Weaver, for her part, claimed she was “humbled and honored” to join an administration she said prioritizes tenants over property owners.

But the controversy escalated this week when Weaver was confronted by reporters outside her Crown Heights apartment — and promptly broke down in tears, according to the New York Post. The 37-year-old activist fled back inside her building after being asked about what critics have labeled staggering hypocrisy: her mother owns a $1.6 million home in Nashville, Tennessee.

The optics were brutal. Weaver, who has railed against gentrification and condemned homeowners as tools of systemic oppression, has lived for years in rapidly gentrifying Crown Heights — a neighborhood she herself has criticized as being transformed by speculative capital. As the New York Post reported, Weaver once declared there is “no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier,” despite being a middle-class white woman educated at Bryn Mawr College and NYU.

In a prior interview with Dissent magazine, Weaver blamed landlords, bankers, and policymakers for fueling gentrification cycles in Crown Heights, stopping well short of acknowledging her own role in the neighborhood’s transformation. Meanwhile, public records show her mother — a college professor — owns a luxury home valued at $1.6 million, a fact Weaver has declined to address directly.

Facing mounting criticism, Weaver attempted damage control in a NY1 interview, insisting, “I don’t think I’m out of my mind.” She conceded that some of her past rhetoric was “regretful” and said she wouldn’t phrase things the same way today, but defended her ideology by pointing to what she described as “decades of experience” in housing activism.

For critics, the episode has become emblematic of Mamdani’s administration: revolutionary rhetoric colliding with real-world contradictions. Weaver’s collapse under basic questioning, combined with her past calls to dismantle private property and capitalism, has only intensified fears that New York City’s housing policy is now being steered by activists hostile to the very concept of homeownership itself.

As Fox Digital reported, federal officials are watching closely. And as the New York Post noted, voters are left asking a simple question: if the people in charge of protecting tenants despise property ownership — except when it benefits their own families — whose interests are they really serving?